In China’s Xinjiang province, where the Turkish Uyghur population is a majority, is also where the Chinese government has some of its strictest, most wide-ranging, and absolutely privacy-invading surveillance activities. Earlier this year in May, the Human Rights Watch had exposed how police in Xinjiang used a smartphone app to monitor (and oppress) its people. The app monitors everything, from flagging use of banned apps such as WhatsApp, to gaining access to contacts, text messages, and almost everything else on a user’s smartphone – this data would then be used by the police to decide which individuals to question or detain.
Once installed on an Android phone, by “side-loading” its installation and requesting certain permissions rather than downloading it from the Google Play Store, BXAQ collects all of the phone’s calendar entries, phone contacts, call logs, and text messages and uploads them to a server, according to expert analysis. The malware also scans the phone to see which apps are installed, and extracts the subject’s usernames for some installed apps.”
The reports also point out that while invasive, the BXAQ or Feng Cai malware is nowhere near the level of surveillance and oppression that the local population in Xinjiang lives under. The majority Uyghur population in Xinjiang is constantly under CCTV surveillance, and the IJOP (Integrated Joint Operations Platform) app that’s installed on the locals’ phones, labels many seemingly harmless actions as suspicious, including things like “not socializing with neighbors.”
